An upbeat-looking galaxy cluster appears to smile at us in a newly released image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The cluster - designated as SDSS J1038+4849 - appears to have two eyes and a nose ...

The Universe is pervaded by a mysterious form of matter, dubbed dark matter, about five times more abundant than the ordinary matter—made of atoms—we are familiar with. Its existence in galaxies was robustly ...

How do astronomers determine the shapes of objects that are too far away to photograph? One method is by using spectropolarimetry, an observational technique that measures the way light waves align after ...

We live in a galaxy that is called the Milky Way. It's called a barred spiral galaxy, which means that it has a spiral shape with a bar of stars across its middle. The galaxy is rather huge—at least 100,000 ...

A quick think about optical astronomy would have you imagine that most of it takes place at night. Isn't that when the stars and galaxies come out to play? Well, that assumption makes at least one glaring ...

Galaxies can take many shapes and be oriented any way relative to us in the sky. This can make it hard to figure out their actual morphology, as a galaxy can look very different from different viewpoints. ...

Hot gas, dust and magnetic fields mingle in a colorful swirl in this new map of our Milky Way galaxy. The image is part of a new and improved data set from Planck, a European Space Agency mission in which ...

Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias are studying the evolution and formation of hundreds of close galaxies and have just published new scientific ...

A storm is brewing, a battle of words and a war of the worlds. The Earth is not at risk. It is mostly a civil dispute, but it has the potential to influence the path of careers. In 2014, a Harvard led debate ...

While most of us are stuck on planet Earth, we're lucky enough to have a fairly transparent atmosphere. This allows us to look up at the sky and observe changes. The ancients noticed planets wandering across ...